Honestly, I'll take inspiration just about anywhere I can find it, so when I was looking through my stamping plates and I noticed the graphics on the back of the Pueen Visual Wonderland 01 Stamping Plate* and a lightbulb hit, I went with it. Earlier this year, I had the idea to create a mani pairing two different full cover stamping images on the nail to make a blocked design and I felt like the sort of graphic optical illusion type images on this plate would work perfectly to create a really simple but impactful mani. 

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Going into this mani, I knew that I wanted there to be a fairly strong contrast - I really wanted both of the stamping images to pop - so I decided that I was going to grab for classic black and white stamping polishes for the actual design. Choosing a base polish was actually more of an adventure because I knew that I wanted to go with something really bright, but I wasn't sure what really. Ultimately, I ended up using a really bold purple shade with a holographic flake through it because I felt like it would hold up to the stamping and give a fun, summery look even though there's nothing overly themey in the design, if that makes sense. 

Choosing two images from the plate to give the look that I wanted was actually pretty easy. I knew I wanted two distinctly different images, but ones that were comprises essentially of just lines. I ended up going with the sort of striped checkerboard pattern and the image with the hearts at the center, though when it came to the latter I went with one corner of the image so that I didn't actually have the hearts on my nails. I started by applying the heart image in black, trying to fill a little less than half of the nail, and then I went in with white to apply the checker board image over the rest of the nail. I don't mind a little bit of overlap where the two images meet with these patterns because the checkerboard image camouflages quite well. 

Once I was happy with my stamping, I sealed it in with a nail art top coat and then followed with a generous layer of glossy top coat for shine and volume. And voila!

I'm really so happy with how this mani turned out and so glad that I thought to try it. I have done this technique once before with an occasion specific design, but it hadn't occurred to me to do it with this more kind of classic, graphic style of design and I love the way it turned out. I have to say, I really, really like this plate in general and I think it has some really great designs to create really sort of bold mani designs, but what really impressed me with this mani was actually the pickup - super crisp and gorgeous!

All of the Pueen products that I used in this mani are available from Amazon and I highly recommend!

Thanks for reading!